The Lodger (2009) - 3/4

The Lodger is one of the most confusing instances of plotting since The Big Sleep. I mean that mostly as a compliment. The film maintains so many possibilities until the final moment that the audience is forced to give up trying to figure out what's really going on and just observe and accept what's shown; no point trying to puzzle out the how once you know the who, because it won't get one anywhere.

Chandler Manning (Alfred Molina) is a detective with the LAPD. He's a rude, unpleasant fellow whose controlling behaviour has put his wife in the hospital with severe depression, but he's good at his job--or so it seemed. He had a man executed for murders and now the same murderer appears to be killing again in the style of Jack the Ripper. Just as the killings begin, a neglected housewife (Hope Davis) takes a lodger (Simon Baker) for extra cash and begins to suspect that either this man or her nearly-always-absent husband (Donal Logue) is responsible for the string of prostitute murders.

There are several things The Lodger does right. For one, it is never predictable. A lot of the scenes one expects to occur never do and a lot of scenes one would never expect happen. Ondaatje, who directed and wrote the screenplay, takes the story in unexpected directions. He also does excellent work on building the relationships amongst the characters. Each one of the major characters in this film is an obsessive; they're all obsessed with something and the obsessions make them who they are as well as destroy their chances at stable relationships. I would go so far as to say The Lodger is about obsession; obsession in the tradition of Visconti rather than Hitchcock.

It's also a film about suspicion. Everyone in this film is suspicious of everyone else. The landlady suspects her husband and the lodger, her husband suspects her of going mad, Manning himself becomes a suspect to the FBI, and so on. There is very little trust amongst any of these people. They're all burdened down with paranoia and the film imparts this paranoia to the audience with one red herring after another. There are so many possibilities that the audience is woven into the paranoia and we begin to suspect all of the characters too. It's like being in the mind of a Jack the Ripper scholar--and we do meet one in the film--to whom at least a dozen people could be responsible for the murders. But when everyone is a suspect, how to narrow the search to the right one?

The depiction of male-female relationships in The Lodger is also worth noting. As one might expect, the neglected and verbally abused housewife falls for the mysterious lodger; but there are dimensions in that relationship that far exceed expectations. The murders are particularly vicious, although the film is too tasteful to do more than describe them: the prostitutes have their sexual organs removed. Manning's dying relationship with his wife and daughter is explored in some detail. Most of the women in the film are on medication. What does it all add up to? I don't know, but I do know men don't come out of it too well.

While The Lodger is a decent film, it has an unfortunate, tacked-on ending. Ondaatje should certainly be applauded for keeping so many balls in the air at once, if not for his unnecessary stylistic noodling. There is a lot going on in The Lodger at all times, yet neither the pacing nor emotional tenor is lost for a moment. As the thriller courses along as a good thriller, it builds a web of irony so clever I readied myself to call The Lodger one of the year's most interesting. Then the final two minutes unravels all the irony. It is still a good thriller, but it could have been a very good thriller.